Record Face and Screen with Descript (Beginner Tutorial 2026)
Ross Zeiger shows how to record video and screen in Descript on Mac, covering four recording modes, teleprompter setup, audio settings like Studio Sound and auto-gain, camera resolution matching, and screen capture options including full-screen, region, and window modes.
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If you wanna record your face and your screen like I'm doing right now, then you need Descript. This tutorial is everything you need to get started. The first thing I need to tell you about the process that you're about to see in this tutorial is that I am on a Mac computer and I'm gonna show you this through the desktop app. You can also use Descript through the web browser, but no matter which way you're using Descript and whether you're on Windows or Mac, the process is more or less the same. There's just a few subtle differences and I'll point those out when I get there. So to start our recording, we're going to do it from scratch. So here I am on the homepage of Descript. This is when you first open up your Descript, you log in, and at the top right corner, you see these two buttons. Click on the one that says record. And from here, you have a choice of camera, screen, audio only, or record with others. Record with others is similar to a Zoom call. It's a way that other people can join you and you can record a conversation together. We're not gonna talk about that in this tutorial. We're gonna focus on these top 3. And with these top 3, these are only starting points. So for example, you could choose camera, which is only gonna record your camera and not your screen, but you could choose to turn off your camera and turn on your screen or vice versa. So these are only starting points. You can customize them once you enter any of these settings. So let's go to screen. You click on that and it puts you into a new project. And again, because I'm on the desktop app, it opens up this floating window that I can drag around my screen. And by the way, this is exactly how I'm recording the video that you're watching right now. But returning to our project that we're about to start, here's our floating window. I'm just going to go through all of your options here. So you can choose to close your window, and then it's just gonna— it's gonna kick you out of here, and you're just going to be in a blank project that you can start from scratch. Next to that is which layer this is going to go into. If you want to deep dive on layers, check out my tutorial in the top right corner, or check out my course link below. But basically You can put this into the script, meaning that the video you're currently recording will be transcribed and it's your most important video. Or you can click new layer where this will get recorded over an existing layer. In most cases, you're probably gonna want to record into the script. Moving on. This is a teleprompter feature. So you can see I have another floating window that just opened up. And in here you could paste in a script if you have one. You could type a script from scratch, or there's an import from script. If you have a, maybe a Word document or a text file, then you could import that and bring a script in here. And what's going to happen is as soon as you hit record, your script is going to automatically start scrolling and you can read off of this while your webcam is getting captured. And I have an entire tutorial deep dive. On how to use the teleprompter feature and how to get the most out of it. And that's going to be linked up in the top right corner of this YouTube video. But for now, I'm just going to X out of that. And we're going to go to the next thing, which is this. If you click on this button, this, if it's, if it's bright, if it's white and not gray, then it's going to record your computer's audio. What does that mean? Let's say. That you're recording your screen and on your screen you have a YouTube video. Well, when you go to play that YouTube video, if this is bright and highlighted in white, then it's going to capture the sound from that YouTube video coming from your computer itself. So it's going to be the highest quality audio coming out of your computer, as opposed to if you turn this off, then your microphone will pick up the sound of that YouTube video and it's not going to sound as good because it's getting picked up secondhand. It's not the direct source. It's getting picked up through your microphone. So if that's important, if the sound from your computer is important, make sure that is toggled on. Next to that, we have this little settings menu, and I'm just going to go through these in order. So when you click on the settings menu, the first thing is a countdown. What this is going to do. If you have it toggled on, is when you click the red record button, it's going to give you a countdown from 3. So it's going to say 3, 2, 1, and then you're live. It's going to actually be recording. Personally, I leave that off. I like to just start recording the second I hit that red button. Below that, you have microphone audio settings. So if transcription is toggled on, your recording is going to automatically transcribe your voice. It's going to turn your audio. Into text on the page for you to edit. That's going to start happening the second you hit the stop button. If you have that toggled on, I suggest you might as well do it because transcription doesn't cost you anything anymore inside of Descript. Below that you have default speaker. If you click on this, you can choose different AI speakers that you've trained. If you haven't trained one, then you won't see anything here yet. But this has to do with if you make a correction to your audio, using AI, then this will determine which speaker to use the AI voice for. Additionally, it'll label it. So if you have multiple speakers and you're adding different videos, then this will keep straight which speaker belongs to which voice. Below that, you have Studio Sound. If you have this toggled on, this is going to automatically apply Studio Sound to your video as soon as you hit stop recording. And if you don't know what Studio Sound is, It's a feature that uses AI to isolate your voice. So if you have a background air conditioning hum or traffic, things like that, it's going to mute that out so that it sounds like you're recording in a studio. And next to that, Studio Sound is very simple. The only thing you can do besides turning it on and off is adjust the intensity. So right now, if I started recording, it would apply Studio Sound at 100% intensity. Now for most environments, 100% is too intense. It makes the voice sound flat and robotic. So what I actually want to do is click in there and type in a number less than 100, like 80% or 70% usually sounds pretty good for most environments. Below that, auto gain. This is going to automatically adjust the sensitivity of your microphone. I leave it off so I have the most amount of control in the editing process, but you may consider turning it on. Below that is the computer audio. So again, The section we just covered was the microphone audio. This is your voice coming into your computer's input system, whether that's the built-in microphone or perhaps an external microphone like I'm using right now. So this one, computer audio, is the audio that you play in your computer. So in my YouTube example, that would be the audio that is playing through your computer when you click play on YouTube. As before, you can choose to transcribe it or not with the this toggle right here. Again, you might as well do it. If you're paying for Descript, there's no additional cost for transcribing anymore. Below that is default speaker. I leave that off when it comes to the computer audio because usually I'm playing different videos and the speakers vary. Below that is studio sound. Once again, you can apply studio sound if you want. I leave it off in the case of computer audio. And lastly, you have your camera settings and the only thing you can do here is the default resolution. I leave mine at 4K because I have a 4K camera. If I had something less than a 4K camera, it wouldn't make sense to have it at a higher resolution than the camera can support. So if you have a 1080p camera, make sure that's set to 1080p. And if you don't know, Google search my camera or my computer resolution, and then whatever it is, set it at the highest level for that. On the resolution note, if you have a 4K camera, and you're not getting 4K resolution and you've got this set, there's a couple other things to check. You need to check that the camera itself is set to record and stream in 4K. And you also need to check that the cable that your camera is plugged into your computer with can support 4K. So there's a lot of different variables and you need to make sure that every single step of the process is set up for 4K. If it's not, then it might come into Descript at something less. Than the resolution you're expecting. Okay, let's go back. So that's it for our top row of settings. On the bottom row here, we have our inputs. So if you've ever used Zoom or Meet or any sort of video recording software before, then this should be very familiar. When you click on the camera icon, you have your choice of cameras. I'm currently recording into a Sony ZV-E10M2, but if you're recording on, say, a laptop, on a MacBook Pro, you'll get a thing that says FaceTime camera. That's the default for Apple laptops. But for whatever camera input that you want to use, just make sure you select that here. And then that is what you're going to get fed in this little preview. And if you want to turn your camera off, then you simply select the bottom one. And now I'm recording in audio only. And when I'm recording in audio only, you can see this little white bar bouncing right there. And by the way, a tip right there. Is you want it to be bouncing about as big as it is right now, occasionally hitting the yellow. You can see when my voice is louder, it touches the yellow. You don't want it to be red, that'll be too loud. And you don't want it to be really small, otherwise it's probably too quiet. So if it looks about like it does right now where the white bar is filling almost that entire space, that's going to be a good volume level. And of course you can adjust this in post. So after you finish recording, You can adjust the volume louder or quieter, but if it's too quiet or too loud to start with, you can't really fix that. So you do want it to be in a nice medium range. Next to that is your mic input. So just like with our camera, you can choose a different mic input. Most computers have built-in microphones nowadays. You can choose that, or you could choose an external one, maybe plugged into a USB. If you have that. So just make sure you have the right microphone selected there. Next to that, you can choose to record your entire screen. So this is going to capture your entire window like I am right now. You can choose a screen region. And I mentioned to you, I would point out when I come across a difference between the desktop app and the web browser version of Descript. Well, this is one of them. You can only use this region option on the desktop. On the browser, you cannot select regions. So with the region, it opens up this window, which I can drag around my screen, and you can see the bright part of my screen is what's gonna get captured. This, whatever happens inside of that bright window is what's gonna make it into my final video. Everything that's in the gray area surrounding it. Will be outside the scope of what's getting captured. Now below this window, you can see these little numbers. So this is telling me the size of the captured window in pixels, and I can type in there a different number. So it's currently 1924. I can type in there 2800 and boom, it makes it way bigger. And so the number, the first number is going to be the width. The horizontal size in pixels of this window, and the other one is going to be the height. So I can make that 2,000, and now it's really big. And you can see those numbers move together. It's keeping it proportional based on this last setting, which is 16:9 landscape. That's a standard YouTube size. So right now those two numbers are going to be locked into that ratio. So that it's always staying in this particular aspect ratio of 16 wide by 9 high. Alternatively, I could switch to portrait, which is 9 by 16, and now those two numbers are going to be locked into that aspect ratio. Square, which is equal height, equal width, and so on. And then the last one is freeform, where you could choose anything you want. Look at this. It could be super tiny, super skinny, super tall, anything at all you want. You can do that by just grabbing the corners and making it look the size and width you want. And then you can also grab these white dots that are on the corner, the top and bottom and the sides, and you can drag to increase it or decrease it on just that one dimension. Okay, so that was all. Let's go back to our record window here. And that was all under the screen region. It's only going to capture a small region of your screen. Below that, there's a Windows section where you could go to any open app on your computer and record just that entire window. So I just selected my other Descript window that I have open here, and I would be capturing just that. And notice you don't get a preview of the window that you have selected, but but just make sure that you have the right screen captured or the right type of recording that you want. And whatever you do inside of that screen will get captured. So if I come over here to my Descript window and I start manipulating buttons, all of that is going to make it into my video. Or I can go back here and I can turn the screen recording off altogether. And with this current setup, the only thing that would be getting recorded is my microphone. Or I can click on my camera and there I am again. And so once I have everything set up how I want, I've got all my settings, I've got my teleprompter going if I want, I've got my input set. Then I simply hit this red button right here, or I can press space, the space bar on my computer, and that's going to start the recording. And remember that setting with the countdown? If I had that set, if I had that toggle on, it would do 3, 2, 1, and then it would start. If I have it off, then as soon as I press this red button, it's going to start recording, which I'm going to go ahead and do right now. So boom, there we go. I'm now recording and I go through my whole spiel. In the case of a talking head, I would just give my talk and I would hit stop when I'm done. Quick interruption here. I finished filming this tutorial and I was showing what happens after you click the start recording button. But what happens is this window that's on the screen right now pops up, but Descript blocks it out. So the recorder doesn't record this floating window. So I was unable to show you that. And the only way I can show it to you is here in the Descript Help Center. So what it is, is there's, once you're recording, there's a pause button right here, which if you click it, it'll keep the same video that you're currently recording, but it'll just pause it until you click resume. And then down here, this red button is how you stop the recording. So once you click on that, then the recording will stop wherever you're at and it'll start transcribing it and processing it, adding studio sound, all that stuff. If you've chosen to do that in your settings, restart. Will delete the current recording and start over from scratch. This button in the top right will minimize the floating window, the recording window that you have. And of course the cancel button in the top left will cancel and delete the active recording and take you back to your project. And then of course the image here is a preview of yourself or whatever is coming through your webcam so you can see how you're looking at that moment in time. Do note, you don't get a preview of the screen that you're sharing. It's only your webcam. And then that white line down at the bottom where you can see a little preview of the volume coming through your mic. So as soon as you're done with all that, you would hit the stop button and then the video would go into your Descript project. And from there you edit it just like anything else in Descript. And if you don't know how to do that, click on this video right here. Where I walk you from start to finish through an entire Descript project for beginners.
